plants look like corn-teosinte hybrids,*’ but there is no 
other indication that they are the product of recent teo- 
sinte contamination. 
The complex of characters described for the Late 
Sidewise maize of Assam is, as Stonor and Anderson con- 
cluded, an unusual one. It is, however, not unique nor 
confined to Asia. The fact that it occurs in Asia is not, 
in our opinion, evidence either that maize originated 
there or that it was taken there in pre-Columbian times. 
The maize of Italy is in some respects as unusual as the 
maize of Assam, but it, too, has American affinities. No 
maize has yet been found in any part of the Old World 
which does not have its counterparts in America. The 
maize of Assam is no exception to this general rule. 
The authors make much of the fact that the predom- 
inating maize of Assam, Race A, is not represented in 
collections of the maize from the Asiatic coast, and they 
ask how such a race of maize could have gotten to a 
number of isolated hill areas in Asia without leaving a 
very definite record along the coast. ‘‘That maize,’ they 
state, ‘‘could in post-Columbian times have spread to 
each of these various hinterlands without entering into 
the economies of the more civilized people who would 
have handed it on almost passes belief.’’ And again, 
‘To believe that in post-Columbian times maize could 
have penetrated not only to the Naga but to the hill 
tribes of Upper Burma, and of Siam, to the Lolo in cen- 
tral Asia, to the aborigines of Hainan, to the hill peoples 
of Sikkim, and to the interior of New Guinea, in each 
case passing over the more civilized peoples along the 
coast is beyond credulity.’ 
For us it is more difficult to believe that maize could 
have occurred in pre-Columbian times in all of these 
places, as well asin the coastal regions where it has now 
presumably disappeared; and perhaps throughout Cen- 
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